Andrew Sullivan, American by Choice

A Catholic British intellectual becomes a revolutionary American

He would have to leave the country. He would be expelled, an alien carrying a deadly contagion. It didn't matter that in 2010 the HIV was no longer anywhere to be found in his body, that his viral load was down to zero — it was still there, hiding in his brain and in his balls, ready to make its mark on any new cells, having wormed its way into his DNA. And the law was clear. This country, created by the castoffs and criminals of a dying empire, did not want the likes of Andrew Sullivan. And so, although he'd been in the United States since 1984 — his English accent severely eroded and Americanized, the founder of the blog against which all other blogs are measured, a civil-rights pioneer in a country not his own, a man who had married another man in a beachside ceremony on Cape Cod in 2007, a legal right that had been born of his own imagination twenty years before — he would have to leave the country. Back in the 1980s, six weeks after he had arrived in Boston to take up a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard, he had written his parents back in England and said, I know this sounds odd, but I feel as if I've come home. No matter. He'd been fighting this day for seventeen years, managing to renew his visa in Canada without incident every couple of years, until that one time his luck ran out and it looked as if he might be marooned in Toronto forever. They had stamped his passport like a tattoo. Even then he had fought for and received an extension from the government. But now his time was up.

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If a man's life can be defined by the things he fears, this was the greatest of the fears that had organized Sullivan's life, the thing of which he was most terrified.

His first fear had arisen all those years ago, back home in England. His people were barely literate Irish stock, and his father was a jock and both parents deeply Catholic. And here's young Andrew, with his disconcerting sexual secret. When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, "Then there's no hope for me, Mum."

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The second fear stemmed from the first: that he would die a painful and early death. But that was not the worst of it. The thing is, he had wanted to be an American since he stepped off the plane, and by 1993 was actually in the process of getting his green card when he had a couple vials of blood drawn, only to find them infected with HIV. My first and worst thought wasn't 'I'm going to die' — though I surely would die — it was 'I'm going to be expelled from the United States. I can't stay here.' And that was the day — June 23, 1993 — when the three fears of Andrew Sullivan's life came crashing together.

He had a date planned for that night; a nice guy named Robert Cameron was coming down to Washington, D.C., from New York, and there were no cell phones in those days, so I couldn't call to cancel. I went through with it and was doing okay, then halfway through dinner, I began to have a physical reaction to the news and began to shake uncontrollably. It became violent. Robert got me out of there and back to my loft, by which time I was in full convulsion, and the only way to stop me from shaking was to physically hold me down on the floor.

He was worried about how public exposure of his HIV would play, Washington being the viper's nest it is, and he kept his news quiet for as long as he could. When finally it became known, it's funny, the warmest, most heartfelt note I got was from Pat Buchanan. Pat gave me a pass, I guess, because I'm a member of the tribe. Not the gay tribe, the Irish tribe.

Because he was going to die, he had to write everything down. Years before, he had begun to argue for the impossible. In 1988, he had written a short piece for The Advocate saying, Our top priorities should be the two m's — marriage and the military. The main problem was that both ideas were so outlandish as not to seem serious. And consequently, the only people who bothered to hate them at first were other gay people. Sullivan was accused of wanting to assimilate gay culture out of existence. He was called a "collaborator" and "the gay Antichrist." The ferocity of the reaction was driven in part by his avowed Tory conservatism — he saw himself as an autonomous human being and marriage as a matter of individual liberty — trying to play in a political realm that had to that point been the exclusive province of the New Left. But it was precisely his conservatism that drove him to fight for marriage rights. The following year, when the idea of domestic partnerships first began to take root, Sullivan saw the very real danger that these well-meant laws — Aww, the liberals are doing something nice for us! — would actually have the effect of establishing a permanent status for gays as second-class citizens. A separate-but-equal legal ghetto. All my liberal friends were saying, How can you possibly not like domestic-partner laws? I was in an editorial meeting at The New Republic railing about it, and finally Michael Kinsley said, Maybe you should write that down.

And because he was going to die, he undertook to argue the idea of homosexuality from every angle. He would examine every bias and every justification, every claim and every school of thought, every scripture and every study. And through the book that came of it, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Sullivan in a sense redefined homosexuality and argued himself into existence at the same time, just as he feared he would cease to exist.

But he would not die.

Even after the provision of the odious Helms amendment that made HIV an "excludable disease" for travel and immigration to the U.S. was repealed in the summer of 2008, the agencies of the Bush administration somehow didn't get around to promulgating new rules to replace the HIV ban. And then Obama was taking forever.

So in 2009, he had begun searching for a place to rent in London. Maybe Amsterdam. His husband, Aaron Tone of Detroit, would leave the country with him, as would their two dogs, though they'd be separated from the dogs for months due to quarantine. Anyone who knows anything about our dogs knows that, well, that might be the hardest thing.

He would continue his blog, The Dish, from Europe. This job, this thing that I do, I can do from anywhere. He would continue to write about the land of the free and the home of the brave from the Old World. He would continue to argue himself into existence every day.

He answers the door in his boxers, proof that they all really do blog in their underwear. Hi, come in, this is where it all happens. I wanted you to see how I usually work. I'm kind of in the middle of a thing. Regular readers know that beards are a minor obsession, and his is the size of an apostle's, and lately he's taken to dyeing it a bit, because I'm not ready for Santa Claus. He turns and pads back across the loft to the corner, draws back a heavy brocade curtain revealing his blog cave, which is a tiny room cut out of the broad stairwell of his building. Up four stairs and he's there, with a Stickley chair, his laptop, a couple shelves of books, mostly about God, and a large picture window facing the street, a giant St. Andrew's cross dominating the wall opposite. This is the home of The Dish, the remarkable blog with a million regular readers that he started eleven years ago because I am a journalist and I figured I ought to throw my things online — the "things" in Sullivan's case ranging from his Tory conservative political writing to his germinal work on marriage rights for gays, work that culminated this year in the legalization of gay marriage in New York State.

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Of course, eleven years ago more people would have noticed his "things" had he dug a hole in his backyard and put them there, since aside from pornography and The Drudge Report, nothing of note had yet happened online. The tech bubble had burst, all the people who were supposed to be billionaires were scrambling for real jobs, and the future of ink and paper was thought to be quite safe. But I thought, Why the hell not? His old friend Robert Cameron said that he would help, taught himself HTML from a book, and The Dish was born.

Once he learned the basics, Sullivan would blog from ten or so at night until two or three in the morning, reading The New York Times and other papers as the next day's editions went online, teeing off on something stupid from Maureen Dowd — I'd have a go at her before anybody'd read her column. It was fun! — writing his pieces and posting them all at the same time for people to read over their second cup of coffee. And those posts would just sit there for the day. He soon realized that it wasn't enough to have your say once a day, that for this form to work, it would have to be ongoing, never-ending, to be updated as often as humanly possible. Early on, I went to see Matt Drudge — strange fellow, trippy experience, but I really admire him; I'm amazed that this man almost literally destroyed a presidency, sitting in a room with his cat. It's changed a little bit, unfortunately — now he just spouts Republican orthodoxy — but in the old days, it was a glorious, eclectic tabloid, just madcap. And he told me something that became critical to my thinking: "It's a broadcast, not a publication." It has to keep moving to survive. If it stops or is frozen for the day, then you don't exist. Another critical insight was that for the first time ever, all the privileges that the big entities had forever enjoyed — distribution, newsstand — were flattened by the technology. It was incredibly exciting, made all the more exciting because the traditionalists still thumbed their noses.

But by now, The Dish has become a unique Internet touchstone, a site that might be the one place driven by moral force independent of moralism or tiresome political cant. Whereas the political Internet exists entirely to polarize, Sullivan resists polarization. And certainly, it is the site more driven by and reliant on the interesting mind of its author than any other going. Across the range of subjects animating the Internet and the world on a given day, readers want to know what Andrew Sullivan thinks. The same can't be said for Arianna Huffington or Matt Drudge. And heaven help you if Sullivan turns on you, as he can be relentless in his biases, giving a digital twist to the old ink-by-the-barrel axiom. Of course, his devoted readership holds him to account for everything, especially positions that he's come to regret — chiefly his early passionate support of the war in Iraq — and, the Internet being what it is, there are the nuts who regularly taunt him. You have AIDS dementia, writes one. Another wants Sullivan to know that I have people watching you.

The apartment where he lives and works is a quiet, elegant place, mostly owing to Aaron's good taste in furniture, a spartan loft with vaulted ceilings set in a building that was once a school for special-ed children, in a D.C. neighborhood that used to be so bad that when he moved in twenty years ago, no one would come to visit. But in those days Sullivan didn't live here so much as camp out here, one big room with a simple mattress on the floor and a few bags of clothes. I don't like walls. I never have liked walls. It's part of why I like America — it doesn't feel so cramped to me as England. The writers Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg were his neighbors back then, all having moved into the building together in solidarity, but they've long since decamped.

I'm sorry for the clutter. You strain your eyes to all four corners of the room, and there is no clutter at all. I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things. In the foyer are Sullivan's books, a surprisingly restrained library for a man who once edited The New Republic and has been writing since shortly after he arrived in America — a few hundred books on custom-built cherry shelves. I only download books now. He is sometimes frustrated that his teeming blog mind leaves little room for other thought. Not that I have time to read them.

Sullivan has on a T-shirt with the word NUMB on it, and he does have the faraway look of a man who keeps a hundred conversations going in his head at almost all times. I think my brain has been changed by keeping a million bloody things in my head at once. The room is quiet, but traffic fills Sullivan's head, and as he sits in the Stickley gazing at the screen, he carries on a conversation with himself — Hmmm ... Yes, yes, yes... Uh-oh... What is wrong with you? Take a look at this. [Laughs.] Funny, huh? ... This is the kind of stuff we get to do... Perry is shockingly uninformed... Look, a recipe for gluten-free scones! ... Ugh, Trig ...

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It's his dexterous mind that got him out of Surrey, not only the first member of his family to go to college but president of the Oxford Union his second year. His parents weren't entirely sure what to make of their boy, who became so skilled at Latin translation that he could translate in the manner of Cicero or, if you prefer, Tacitus. I was a super Latin nerd. A super Latin nerd in a deep homosexual panic, which is why he immersed himself in books and politics in the first place. Homosexuality was simply not talked about. The first I remember even seeing the word was in school, drawn in graffiti on a bathroom wall, which read, "My mother made me a homosexual." And underneath that, someone else had written, "If I give her the wool, could she make me one, too?"

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He dated women gamely, trying to seem normal, even continuing after he arrived at Harvard, until he just couldn't anymore, and he had to tell this one girl, I'm really sorry, but you deserve to know. He was twenty-three.

At the same time he was experiencing another transformation. I arrived here, and you had people brawling over everything that mattered, and just presuming to do so, honoring no protocol or pecking order, and showing precious little deference to position... This was so different from the land of my birth. This was the America of my dreams.

Of course, he was already American, certificate or not. He was as American as the first American, who was not American at all but who left a place far away and arrived in this new place as a very different person. That is, of course, the essence of Americanism, which is to say that the immigrant with a vision of America may be more American than the baby born on this soil ten generations hence.

But the minute he started talking about a right no one had ever seriously contemplated, most who heard him reacted with Who the fuck are you? You don't know what you're talking about, you and your little essays. And you're English! And that is how Sullivan came to be an American civil-rights pioneer: In the end, he didn't know enough about America, outside his beautiful idealized version, to realize that what he wanted to do was simply impossible.

During the time he was supposed to be dead, Sullivan developed the intellectual and legal underpinnings of his argument. He partnered with the legal scholar Evan Wolfson to plot strategy state by state, we kept each other sane, and he spoke to scores of groups all over the country about this idea of legal equality. His audiences were overwhelmingly straight, as what's the point in just talking to ourselves? It was the straight world we'd have to persuade. He would ask them whether any heterosexual citizen of this society has conceived for a second that they had a right to the pursuit of happiness which did not include the right to marry the person they love.Having come out in gay America, I was astonished by the gap between the perception of gay people in this country and actual gay people. No one saw regular gay people, or gay people serving their country. All those things that would have associated gay people with the heart of America had been defined out of existence. I was obviously raised in the straight world. And like a lot of gay people, I had been imbued with heterosexual norms. I was as good as they, I was as much of a full person as they were, and I wanted what they had. Most gays did. And I thought that if the rest of the world could see what I see, none of this ghastly discrimination and pain would exist. And little by little, discrimination has become harder to defend. So much so that decades after Sullivan began his lonely fight, marriage has become the highest priority for gay people in America, as without marriage, we aren't even at the starting line of citizenship in the eyes of the law.

And so it was that on the evening of June 24, 2011, eighteen years and one day after he was told he had no future, Sullivan was upstairs at his favorite hangout in Adams-Morgan, a place called the Duplex Diner, live-blogging the proceedings in the New York State Senate as New York became the largest state to legalize marriage, not by judicial means but by a vote of the people's legislature. And through a Senate that was majority Republican, at that.

He did not disappear. He did not die. He did not leave America. And in April of this year, after having first had his application for permanent residency rejected and being forced to appeal, Sullivan received an envelope in the mail containing a letter that began, "Welcome to the United States ..." And as soon as he is able, he'll become a naturalized American citizen. He shows his green card. For the longest time, I'd carry it around with me, then Aaron said, "You know, you should probably put that in a safe place."

He climbs down from his blog cave, stretches, scratches his impressive beard. He walks over to the dining table, where he dumps a handful of pills. He tries to limit himself to blogging from 8:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. most days now, meaning that he and his marvelous staff try to have everything written and scheduled by early afternoon. So I don't get sick again. How's that working? Eh. He had severe respiratory problems this spring, from exhaustion. Now I try going to the gym, taking a bike ride, or reading an actual bloody book. The three fears that have shaped his life are gone. When the things you've steeled yourself against go away, you have to then figure out what to live for again. It is surprising, but you realize that you've lost something of your purpose. And even if you've been relieved of adversity, it can actually be depressing. His voice trails off. He could not have dreamed of this day, and is puzzled at the mix of his emotions, and yet the rich engagement of life continues. Who could have imagined? And this, he says, gesturing to the larger world outside this loft in Northwest Washington, to America, is my home, and that is something that can never, ever, ever be taken away from me.